


Claudia and Kristy would never have lasted

by Aja



Series: Shenanigans Universe [19]
Category: Shenanigans (Original Universe)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Christmas, Demisexuality, Hipsters, Karaoke, M/M, Moments of truth, Pining, Theatre Kids, Winter, arcane geekery, but you wouldn't want to be there anyway, everyone is invited to the dadaist party in blake's head, frenemies to lovers, no one is invited to the impressive overanalysis spiral in elliot's head, still the most shamefully underused tag on AO3 come on guys, the babysitters' club, winter vacation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-29
Updated: 2019-01-29
Packaged: 2019-10-18 22:49:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,628
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17589905
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aja/pseuds/Aja
Summary: It's aBabysitters' ClubShenanigans Winter Special! Elliot finally figures out that he's head over heels for Jonah, but that doesn't make things easier — quite the opposite. Fortunately, the gang is going on a road trip to snowy Vermont for Christmas. Will Jonah and Elliot finally be able to get on the same page?  (Spoiler alert: yes.)





	Claudia and Kristy would never have lasted

**Author's Note:**

> Look if you guys think I haven't spent the last 18 months of my life perpetually thinking about Jonah and Elliot and imagining endless different scenarios in which they finally confess their epic ridiculously fraught love for one another, then you don't know me, or Jonah, or Elliot. :D This is basically a Shenanigans AU where they're still in their final year of college, except Jane has already skipped town and Nicholas and Caroline are already an item. Not to fear: Elliot is still clueless. 
> 
> Thanks to EGT for encouraging me to write this once it got stuck in my head and then putting aside all her Elliot hangups and reading it for me. Also, no thanks to EGT for leaving me comments like, "NICHOLAS DODGED A BULLET," "Jonah deserves so much better, he should totally get with Blake," and "I would not be friends with any of these people." Sorry, pal. We all have our weaknesses, and Jonah's is a mouthy twink with a closet full of identical Oxfords and entirely too many thoughts about design.

  
An unexpected side effect of Nicholas and Caroline finally getting their shit together is that Elliot can no longer entirely avoid The Jonah Situation. Although, to be fair, he doesn’t actually realize that he’s started thinking of The Jonah Situation as The Jonah Situation — or really that it’s a thing he’s been avoiding — until he rounds a corner and is rudely confronted by the Situation one day.

It’s a few days after Nicholas and Caroline finally get together, and Elliot’s been — not bored, exactly, since it’s not like Nicholas just completely stopped hanging out with him; but restless and a bit sorry for himself. It’s hard to muster up the energy for Shenanigans, after all, when your Shenanigans partner is currently off galavanting around with the love of their life, and your other former Shenanigans partner is off in California, and when the only other person on the horizon who seems primed to step in where Nicholas and Jane left off is, well, Blake.

He’s maybe skulking around the Paramount feeling ornery because Nicholas’s not there to hear his great idea about putting on a Cryptid Scavenger Hunt in the hallowed halls of the theatre department, which actually would be something Blake would probably love, except that knowing Blake he’d actually skip all sense of irony and actually find actual cryptids, and then they’d all wind up getting chased by monsters like they were in an episode of Buffy, instead of using cryptids as a metaphor to comment wryly upon artistic mores and the rise of modern absurdist —

Elliot halts. Jonah is leaning against the wall by the casting announcements, hands in his pockets, long legs crossed, clearly hitting on the boy next to him, some random new student Elliot’s never seen before, and a pang of raw emotion shoots through Elliot, right to his bones.

The sight of Jonah confidently hitting on hot twinks in the halls of the Emerson theatre department is burnt into Elliot’s retinas by now. He shouldn’t be fazed by it at all. And yet, for whatever reason, on this particular day, he sees Jonah and is abruptly aware that he’s spent the last four years burying this rough mix of annoyance and lust and jealousy and longing and terror, hoping he could outlast it. Except it’s been in the back of his mind, never deep enough to disappear, and apparently all it took to rip off this flimsy bandaid was a few days without Nicholas around to distract him from it.

Oh, god, Elliot thinks. He’s a walking cliche, a hazard to himself.  

Jonah looks up, sees him, and Elliot’s stomach flip-flops at the look that flits across his face, and honestly, everything about this is mortifying. Elliot orders himself to remember that Jonah is a gauche performative showboat whose entire persona is carefully cultivated and calculated to elicit precisely this kind of response in the unsuspecting.

Except Elliot is not unsuspecting; Elliot is On To Him, which is precisely the reason Elliot’s heart should not be thudding in his chest when Jonah stops talking to the anonymous boy by the wall and comes over to Elliot instead, because Jonah doesn’t hit on him, he knows better than to try, and none of this means anything — except that Jonah is smiling at him with the half-wry, half-wary expression he reserves mainly for Elliot. And Elliot doesn’t know when he came to know that Jonah has a custom-tailored Elliot expression, but he’s pretty sure he has one custom-tailored just for Jonah, too. It probably says all the things he doesn’t want it to say, because clearly it hasn’t been enough to keep Jonah far away from him, or to keep all these horrible emotions away from Elliot.

“Hey,” Jonah says, and now Elliot thinks maybe Jonah has an Elliot-only voice, too, warm but somehow still aloof.

Elliot takes a step backwards instead of the step towards Jonah he wants to take, which probably makes him look a little like a droid ordered in two directions at once. He flails a little, and his back hits the wall, and Jonah’s smile twists even further. “Who is that guy?”

“He’s Swedish,” Jonah says. “So, Hans or Mads or Bjorn, probably.”

“Oh, well, by all means, don’t let me stop your conquest of the ABBA comeback tour.”

“ABBA is forever, I think I’ll be fine,” Jonah says, unbothered, and Elliot laughs a little before he can stop himself, then feels himself flush. He definitely doesn’t imagine the way one of Jonah’s eyebrows rises slowly upward.

“I’ve been wanting to ask how you’re doing,” he says. “Since the whole Nicholas-Caroline thing.”

“Me?” Elliot blinks up at him. “Why me?”

Jonah tilts his head and gives Elliot a flat, expectant look.

“No, seriously,” Elliot insists. “What’s it to do with me?”

Jonah says gently, “It can’t be easy losing that level of camaraderie overnight when someone else enters the picture.”

Elliot shrugs, but he’s a bit discomfited by the thought that Jonah of all people has been the one to notice how unsettled he’s been the last few days. “People do it all the time,” he says, hoping he sounds dismissive.

“Yes, but you and Nicholas are typically inseparable,” Jonah says. “And you’re not exactly what I’d call low-maintenance.”

Elliot flips him off. Jonah doesn’t look away from him, and it dawns on Elliot all at once that the way they’re standing, Jonah leaning into Elliot, pressed against the wall, anyone who saw them together might think — might think they were —

“I’m fine,” he says, swallowing. “It’s not like — Nicholas and I weren’t ever — we’ll always be best friends.”

Jonah says, “Really?” and Elliot can’t quite answer him for a moment, because his knees have suddenly forgotten how to be knees.

“Yeah,” he says eventually, only it comes out raspy over his newly dry throat. “It wasn’t like that, with us. And anyway, it was way worse when Jane went off to work for Google, so really, you should be congratulating me on how convenient it is that two of my best friends are dating instead of leaving me for jobs across the country.”

“That’s an astonishingly mature perspective,” Jonah says. “How much did you drink before you called Jane and she offered it to you?”

“I’m rescinding your position within my circle of acquaintances.” Elliot tells him.

“Not a chance,” Jonah says. “I’ve far too much blackmail material on all of you.”

“Not on me.”

“Oh, especially on you,” Jonah says, and they’re definitely leaning into each other, and it’s definitely awful, and Elliot is definitely not thinking about why Jonah would care whether or not he’s on the rebound.

He reaches for the first thing he can think of to sever this strange giddy extended moment of eye contact.

“If I said the words ‘cryptid scavenger hunt’ to you,” he blurts.

“I’d ask whether these were literal or metaphorical cryptids,” Jonah replies without batting an eyelash.

“Forget I asked,” Elliot says, and he flees.

  
  


 

Elliot will walk into the Charles and drown before he actually talks to anyone else about The Jonah Situation, but that just means that the Jonah Situation largely continues unabated until their next night at the Hong Kong. Jonah keeps being Jonah, and Elliot keeps, well, _noticing_ , and although he has the faint impression that Jonah might be noticing him noticing, it doesn’t stop Jonah from continuing to be Jonah: read, continuing to flirt, hit on, and sleep with anything that moves. Anything that isn’t Elliot, that is, because Elliot absolutely isn’t interested, except that he can’t stop _thinking_ about it.

Anyway, they all go out to the Hong Kong to celebrate the winding-down of their last mid-terms, and Elliot gets progressively drunker and more maudlin throughout the evening while watching some transparently gauche moron with terrible dress sense and eighteen hands spend the evening hitting on Jonah. Jane is still a few days out from flying home, Nicholas and Caroline mostly have eyes only for each other, Blake is obsessed with showing anyone who will listen his new idea for a hand-puppet musical about police brutality, and no one but Elliot is able to properly attend to Jonah’s terrible life choices.

It’s not as if Elliot’s not used to this routine; he’s seen it play out often enough over the years. He’s never seen Jonah turn down an easy hookup with a decent item, which, despite his terrible popped collar and unfortunate khaki situation, this guy is.

But for whatever reason, on this particular night at the Hong Kong, Jonah ultimately, and apparently to Eighteen Hands’ surprise and faint disgust, says goodnight and returns to Elliot’s side to start a fight with him about Trello.

“All I’m saying,” Jonah is in the middle of saying, “is that even if it _is_ kind of a virtual bullet journal, the whole point of a bullet journal is that it’s _not_ virtual—”

“Jonah,” Elliot interrupts. “Why didn’t you go home with that guy?”

Jonah halts and looks at him.  Then he says deliberately, “I’m going to get a drink, would you like anything?”

“I’ll have a Last of the Mojitos, please,” Elliot says promptly, and a smile flickers over Jonah’s face before he nods and heads to the bar. Eventually he resurfaces with two identical mojitos, and Elliot watches his throat bob as he tastes his own and then winces.

“Why did you even get one if you don’t like mojitos?” he asks.

Jonah shrugs. “Thought I might be coming round to the possibility,” he says, taking another experimental sip.

“Just take big gulps,” Elliot says, demonstrating. “It helps to pretend like you’re already drunk.”

“You _are_ already drunk,” Jonah says, amused.

“Yeah, but you never are,” Elliot answers.

“I am occasionally drunk,” Jonah answers reasonably.

“No,” Elliot tells him sourly. “Even when you’re drunk you’re never drunk, drunk. You _would_ be that kind of drunk.”

“You are completely quixotic,” Jonah says, not sounding upset about it at all, and Elliot turns to him and looks at him and holds his gaze before he loses his nerve.

“So why didn’t you?” he asks.

Jonah takes  a long gulp of his mojito, then shrugs.

“Maybe I thought I might get a better offer,” he says carefully after a moment. He pointedly doesn’t look at Elliot as he says it, but the moment stretches between them anyway, and Elliot grips his drink and takes several long swallows, until he remembers all the reasons he shouldn’t be pursuing this, all the reasons he and Jonah would never work, all the reasons he and Jonah don’t really even _like_ each other, all the reasons Jonah would scoff at the idea of having a — a whatever, a relationship or anything, with anyone, let alone with _him_.

It’s an apparent instinct for complete self-sabotage that prompts him to ask anyway:  “What does a better offer look like?”

Jonah looks out across the bar, as if he thinks the better offer might stand up and announce itself. “I don’t exactly have a word for it, but I’d say it’s the kind of offer that makes you want to stop looking.”

“You’re always looking,” Elliot says. “All you _do_ is look. And you’ve never stopped before, why stop now?”

Instead of answering, Jonah glances up and says mildly, “Oh, look, my song’s up. Care to join me?”

“And, what, sing a duet with you?” Elliot grants himself the dignity of looking horrified at this prospect.

Jonah’s lips quirk. “Well, not if it’s going to be like that.” He excuses himself as the song intro starts, walks to the stage, and promptly begins singing in perfect Spanish, _“Siempre que te pregunto_...”

“Son of a bitch,” Elliot says aloud to no one. “That’s my favorite fucking song. Of course Jonah knows my favorite fucking song. _In Spanish_.”

“Are you talking to yourself about how much you hate Jonah again?” Caroline says, appearing from nowhere and stealing a sip of his mojito.

“I hate him so much,” Elliot says miserably. “You can have the rest of that.”

He grabs a mic from the KJ and leaps unceremoniously onstage in time to harmonize the second half of the verse, the notes of his light tenor falling easily over Jonah’s smooth baritone, rich and effortless thanks to all Elliot’s long practice spent singing along to Bobby Capo as a kid, a byproduct of his perfectly reasonable and age-appropriate _Strictly Ballroom_ obsession.

Jonah’s Elliot-only expression is back, somehow soft and wry all at once as he watches Elliot join him, and there’s a moment when they just look at each other, complete and self-contained in the understanding that they are probably the only two people in this bar who know this song, who can sing it like they’ve rehearsed it, because the simple truth is that Jonah and Elliot are always those two people; they truth is that they can’t seem to _help_ doing this. Honestly, Elliot doesn’t sing very often, he knows Jonah knows this, he knows Jonah knows how rare this is, but when he does sing, he’s _good_ at it, and apparently when he sings with Jonah they both sound even better than they normally do, and the crowd just stands and listens because they sound fucking amazing; they _are_ fucking amazing together.

In the beginning, Elliot had been appalled by these moments; they signalled to him only that his taste was at fault. But over the years, he’s started to welcome them; maybe, if he’s being completely honest with himself, he’s grateful for the opportunities they give him to lay aside the ridiculous, fraught tension that’s built up between them and just... enjoy being so totally on the same wavelength with someone who’s competent and talented and so, so completely, well, _Jonah_.

He’s maybe started to think of it all as a little bit star-crossed, which is so appalling he wouldn’t be able to stand himself, if it weren’t for the fact that Jonah keeps _doing_ things like this, irresistible things that Elliot is helpless to resist: he keeps randomly sharing all of Elliot’s most important theatre opinions and reading all Elliot’s favorite mid-century romance writers and understanding that cryptids are metaphorical and knowing all the words to Elliot’s favorite song _in Spanish_ and just generally being infuriatingly hot and posh and unironically serious about all of it, and it’s entirely grossly unfair.

And now their harmony is annoyingly perfect, and Elliot can’t stop shivering, and when Jonah dips down to grab the English lyrics, he sings them without ever taking his eyes off Elliot, and Elliot feels it like a slap, as though this song is a secret conversation that has lain unspoken between them for years, suddenly brought forth into the open and voiced for the first time.

Elliot is maybe feeling swoony because he is drunk, or maybe because he just really loves singing this song, or because it’s three weeks out from Christmas and he’s feeling sentimental. But for whatever reason, the normal cocktail of stomach-heaving emotions he feels when he looked at Jonah — envy, resentment, attraction, longing, more envy, undercut with a hefty amount of terror — are all back with more strength than ever. Jonah’s eyes on his face are dark, the color of rich molasses or candlelight flickering in earthenware jars, and Elliot can’t look away and doesn’t want to. He wants to reach up and cup Jonah’s face right now, keep his hand there and run his thumb over Jonah’s jawline until he hears Jonah’s breath catch in his throat. He wants to figure out exactly how inconvenient their height difference is, whether he’d have to go on tiptoe or whether Jonah would bend for him or if maybe it disappears when they’re standing closer together, or—

Fuck.

Except he can’t. He’s not Jonah’s best offer. He’s not even a better offer. He can’t even imagine the idea of Jonah ever wanting to, to settle down with anyone, let alone _him_ of all people.

And — and so what if they have chemistry? What does any of it mean when they’re so hopelessly... who they are? He can’t bear the thought of asking Jonah to change for him when he’s not even sure he knows how to be in a proper relationship, let alone how to make his heart function like other people’s hearts seem to function.

He’d never be able to ask Jonah for that; he can’t even picture himself finding the words.

When the song is over the crowd roars for them, and he can _feel_ how badly Jonah is fighting the urge to take a bow like they’re onstage. He punches him on the arm and tells him, “You’re such an utter queen,” as he hands the mic back to the KJ and slips back into the crowd.

“Says the person who practically ran up here,” Jonah says, following him.

“You invited me!” Elliot turns and eyes him. “Did you know that was my favorite song? How did you know?”

“I... I didn’t know,” Jonah says. He looks at Elliot like he’s studying his face. “Did you grow up secretly wanting to be a ballroom dancer?”

“I just wanted to dance with Scott at the Pan Pacifics,” Elliot tells him a little helplessly.

“Of _course_ you did,” says Jonah, and his laugh sounds a little helpless, too.

“I just thought you might know the song,” he says, “because you always know all the songs. All the songs, the musicals, the random arthouse films, all the stray bits of pop culture detritus no one else cares about that you not only care about but somehow manage to build entire strange manifestos around.”

By mutual unspoken assent, they’ve been backing towards the private karaoke rooms as they’ve bantered, and Elliot doesn’t realize they’ve done it until they’re suddenly standing together in a side corridor, abruptly alone. Jonah doesn’t quite press Elliot into the wall, but it’s a narrow hallway and a close thing.

“Elliot,” he whispers, and Elliot was wrong, all the other inconvenient, escalating feelings that have been unpleasantly coating his insides all week are nothing compared to this sudden landslide of emotions. “You and me.” Jonah is halting, he’s never unsteady with words like this, but Elliot knows instinctively that he’s fumbling, selecting every one with deliberation. “We’re so good. We’re always so good together. Why won’t you let this be what it is?”

Elliot places his hands flat against the wall to steady himself; he tries to remember how to breathe.

“You’ve never asked me,” he manages. “You’ve, you’ve never even _looked_ at me, out of, out of your sea of endless hook-ups and one-night stands—”

“I am always looking at you,” Jonah says simply, and Elliot completely forgets how to breathe.

“And I haven’t asked you,” Jonah says, urgency lacing his voice, “because I _know_ you, Elliot. I know I only get one shot at this, and if I mess it up, that’s it, no second chances, no taking it slow, just a complete shutdown. And if I’m lucky, I’ll _only_ get back a whole lot of denial that I ever even asked you at all, and if I’m not, there’ll be a bit of mockery in the mix as well.”

Elliot blanches. He starts to protest and then realizes even as he’s starting to form the words that Jonah has more or less just accurately summed up Elliot’s entire treatment of him over the last four years: four years of pretending this hasn’t been, well, _this_ ; four years of shunting it away by heaping as much derision upon the source of all his anxiety as possible.

“I can’t do this,” he chokes out, feeling nausea clawing its way up his throat. “I — I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I have to—” and he flees Jonah’s presence for the second time in a week.

 

 

He fetches a Lyft and calls Jane.

“I’ve been a dick to Jonah,” he blurts. “I mean, I'm always a dick to Jonah but he finally called me on it just as I was realizing I don't actually want to be a dick to Jonah, and I don't know how to transition from dickdom to not dickdom, help.”

“Hello to you, too.”

“This is serious, Jane, what if he hates me?”

“What if he hates you because you're always a dick to him, you mean?”

“Yes!”

“Elliot, you dumbass,” Jane says.

“Wow,” says Elliot. “That is uncharacteristically vulgar of you.”

“Needs must,” says Jane. “Firstly, Jonah isn’t going to suddenly start hating you because of whatever Elliot tantrum you’re having right now, because he knows you too well for that, and if he hasn’t resented you when you’ve been all dramatic and falling-apart in the past, he’s not going to start now.”

“How do you know he hasn’t?” Elliot challenges.

“Because I just know,” she says cryptically. “Look, we all have our weird soft spot for your histrionics.”

“Jonah doesn’t have a soft spot for me,” Elliot pouts.

“Jonah is nothing _but_ soft spots, which you’d know if you ever had a real conversation with him that didn’t devolve into a weird gay pissing contest.”

“I’ve had real conversations with him,” Elliot says.

“Name one.”

“We argue about Jason Robert Brown at least once a month.”

“Arguing about musical theatre does not count, arguing about musical theatre is the _epitome_ of a weird gay pissing contest, why do I even have to tell you this?”

“What do I do?” Elliot asks helplessly.

“What do you _want_ to do?” Jane asks. “You’ve never cared if Jonah liked you before, why start now?”

“I care,” Elliot insists. “We’re, we’re friends. We’re all friends!”

“This crisis you’re having,” Jane says. “Is it maybe because Nicholas’s dating Caroline and you’re down a shenanigans partner?”

“No,” Elliot says. “It’s a completely Jonah-fied crisis. But you should still come home, like, now.”

Jane laughs. “You know what?” she says. “Why don’t you plan a new shenanigan for all of us?”

Elliot instantly sits up straighter in the Lyft, heedless of the protests from his queasy stomach.

“Tell me more,” he says.

“Let’s go on a Christmas retreat,” Jane says. “Like in _White Christmas_. Vermont, tons of snow, fairy lights everywhere, the works.”

Elliot clasps his hands together. “ _Jane_ ,” he says. “You _genius._ "

“Getting you to plan it all for me?” He can hear her grin all the way from California. “Yes, yes I am.”

  
  


 

Against all odds, Elliot feels cheerful when they’re done loading up Blake’s mom’s SUV. All the luggage fits perfectly in the back, and there are already wrapped presents sitting on top because Jane and Caroline are wonders that way, and, like, normal functional people who do normal functional things like go Christmas shopping before Christmas. There’s a package with Elliot’s name on it and it has shiny tinsel, and a little knitted menorah sitting on top all of them even though a) none of them are Jewish and b) none of them knit,  and Elliot can’t stop grinning as he gets into the backseat and cuddles up beside Jane.

“This is going to be great,” he says as they head out. “It’ll be just like the Babysitters’ Club specials, when they all go on winter vacations or trips to the Bahamas.”

“I used to love those books,” Caroline says, turning around. She’s got one hand on Nicholas’s arm and one hand on the road map, which is hilarious because only Jonah would insist on relying upon an actual paper map like it’s the 1900s instead of GPS. He wonders if maybe it’s some sort of mood-setting device: put them all in the mindset that it’s the remote Vermontian wilderness and not just a really nice AirBNB retreat a few miles away from Burlington.

“You’re too young for those books,” Elliot says, slightly crestfallen. She sticks her tongue out at him.

“So are you.”

“Yes, but _I_ am well read,” says Elliot. There’s a snort from the driver’s seat that he pointedly ignores.

“My cousin had the whole series,” Caroline says. “Took up three whole rows of her bookshelf, I was so jealous of her so I used to come to her house and steal copies. Pretty sure I read them all.” She narrows her eyes at him. “Obviously you’re Claudia and Jane is Stacey.”

“Oh,” says Elliot, instantly mollified. “Well. I didn’t want to brag or anything.”

“Shouldn’t I be the Claudia?” Jane says, boredly. “Since I’m the token Asian of our little club?”

Elliot pats her arm. “Claudia is arty and dramatic.”

“Definitely Elliot,” says Nicholas.

“Jonah could be the Claudia,” says Blake. “Jonah’s arty and dramatic, too.” Elliot makes a face at him that Blake doesn’t notice because he’s looking at Jonah for his reaction, which just makes Elliot glare harder. He can’t see Jonah’s reaction anyway because he’s sitting more or less behind the driver’s seat, but he can imagine it.

“Nah,” says Caroline. “Jonah’s too responsible. He’s probably the Kristy.”

“Kristy was so boring,” Elliot mutters. Caroline kicks him. “What? She was! Sorry, Jonah.”

An elegant disembodied hand arises from the steering wheel and waves away the insult.

“Anyway, I’m Dawn, and Nicholas is definitely 100 percent Mary Anne,” Caroline pronounces.

“Nicholas’s definitely Mary Anne,” Elliot agrees.

“Who the hell was Mary Anne?” says Nicholas. “I’ve never heard of any of these people. Except Claudia.”

“Everyone only remembers Claudia!” says Caroline.

“Because Claudia was the _best_ ,” says Elliot.

“Wasn’t Dawn the one who moved to California?” says Jane. “Shouldn’t I be Dawn?”

“No, Dawn moved _from_ California. You’re Stacey,” Elliot tells Jane comfortingly. “Because she moved away and left Claudia behind, but they stayed best friends forever, and eventually she came back and the two of them ruled Stoneybrook Middle School together.”

“Oh, they did,” Jane grins. “With my brains and your beauty?”

“Exactly,” Elliot beams.

“Do I get to be anyone?” Blake asks. There’s a telling silence.

“You can be Mallory,” Caroline says after a moment.

“Do I want to be Mallory?” Blake asks suspiciously. “Does Mallory have any power in this racket?”

“Well,” Elliot starts.

But before he can explain that Mallory is but a junior BSC member, Jonah interjects firmly, “Children, which exit to 93?” and Caroline starts fussing with her road map.

“See, that’s why you’re the Kristy,” Elliot mutters, and Jonah’s eyes meet his for a moment in the rearview mirror, amused but cautious. Something in Elliot’s gut twists and he looks away.

“Why is Jonah even driving, again?” he asks Blake. “This is _your_ parents’ van, shouldn’t _you_ be driving?”

Blake shrugs. “I dunno,” he says, looking at Jonah sitting across from him, as though he can’t imagine how he wound up in the passenger seat and Jonah wound up in the driver’s seat. “Jonah’s just Jonah.”

“I’m going to take a nap,” Elliot announces, rather than dwell on why this is an annoying set of logistics. He leans his head on Jane’s shoulder. “Wake me when we get to the set of _White Christmas_ or whatever.”

“Christmas music!” Caroline says.

“Oh, god, no,” Elliot mumbles, but Caroline is already fiddling with the cd player.

“You brought Christmas _cds_?” Elliot gawks. “It’s 2018, where did you even _find_ cds?”

“Honestly, Elliot, it’s like you’ve never met anyone over 40,” says Caroline. “I just grabbed these from my mom’s stash.” She pulls one out at random. “Johnny Mercer’s Christmas classics!”

“I’m going to expire before we make it to our destination,” says Elliot. Jane pats him on the arm.

Jonah doesn’t say a word, but he pointedly redirects the speakers towards the rear so that the jaunty sounds of Johnny Mercer singing “Sleigh Ride” are piping directly into Elliot’s ears. Elliot flips him the bird. He can’t tell, but he thinks he sees a flash of a grin in the rearview mirror.

Of course no one sleeps; instead they sing dorky Christmas carols and everyone ignores Elliot’s loud and vociferous complaining until he finally gives in and starts singing along. There’s a light snow by the time they pull up to the lodge, which is already blanketed in snow and decorated in twinkling Christmas lights. Rows of even red ribbons line the welcoming wrap-around porch, and there are kitschy plastic candy canes lighting the walkway. It’s so homey and postcard-y that Elliot pauses outside the van for a moment and just takes it in.

There’s warmth next to him and he can tell without looking, somehow, that it’s Jonah. “Did you pick this place?” Jonah asks him.

Elliot shrugs. “Possibly. What do you think?”

Jonah tilts his head and looks as if he’s really seriously considering the colored lights and cute lawn ornaments. Elliot bites back a smile. He sort of misses the days when Nicholas would just come up to him and sort of use him as a pillow; he feels a similar tug towards Jonah now, but he can’t imagine what Jonah would do if Elliot just... leaned against him. People don’t really touch Jonah that way, casually and without any intent other than showing affection. Even Hazel — who, thank god, had other plans for the weekend — who doles out hugs like she’s dispensing over-the-counter drugs, even to Jonah.

He wonders abruptly if that ever makes Jonah feel left out.

“It’s very on-the-nose,” Jonah says. “I think it’s delightful. I’m just surprised you haven’t put us all in some minimalist ice cave.”

“All the minimalist ice caves were already bought out by hipster Eskimos.” Jonah chuckles, and Elliot thinks, fuck it, and leans in to bump his shoulder against Jonah’s — or more properly against Jonah’s arm because Jonah is obnoxiously tall.

“It’s not hard to find nice places, really,” he says. “I just thought something a little kitschy might be fun.”

“Are you getting sentimental in your old age?”

“Just more hygge,” says Elliot. “Soon I’ll be knitting everyone sweaters and cross-stitching patterns that say ‘bless this mess’ to hang in my kitchen.”

“Over your crock-pots and all-day roasts and ‘kiss the cook’ aprons.”

“What could be more me?”

Jonah shoots him a grin, or rather starts to, but their eyes meet and they seem to get stuck there, just looking at each other. Elliot shivers, takes a step back. This isn’t going to be that kind of weekend, he thinks. No drama, no... weirdness, or whatever, with Jonah, just obnoxiously cheesy, toasty-warm fun times with friends.

“There’s an ice pond out back, in case you didn’t think this was enough of a cliche,” he tells Jonah.

“Have you ever even set foot on an ice rink?”

“Me? Nah.” Elliot sends him a smirk. “But my skates are gorgeous.”

“Of course they are,” says Jonah, still smiling, and just then Nicholas does come up to Elliot and swing his arms around Elliot’s shoulders.

“Help me take all these presents inside before they get snowed on?” he asks. Elliot leans back against him, patting him awkwardly on the head.

“You’re so Caroline-whipped,” he says fondly. “I was just going to show Jonah the ice ri — oh.” Jonah has already moved on, grabbing a pile of luggage and carting it inside.

“How are things with you two?” Nicholas asks, lowering his voice. “Still weird?”

“I think weird is our default,” Elliot says. “So, yes.”

“Elliot,” says Nicholas, his voice slipping into, like, conversational advice-giving mode. “Just talk to him. It’s been like two weeks since that whole weird thing you had at the Hong Kong.”

“Three weeks,” Elliot says despondently.

“Three weeks. Just tell him you like him.”

“It’s not even — _like_ isn’t the word, it’s — ugh, this is gross.”

“Well, whatever the word is, go say it to him.”

“I’d rather carve my own eye out and feed it to you all for Christmas dessert,” Elliot says, disentangling himself from Nicholas’s grip.

“So you’d rather just be annoyed at him all the time for not reading your mind?”

“Got it in one,” Elliot mutters.

“Incredible,” Nicholas says dryly. “Astonishing how you’ve managed to stay single all these years.”

“I’m single because you and Jane won’t agree to enter into platonic life partnerships with me,” Elliot pouts.

“You’re single because you’re kinda ace.”

“I’m not ace, I’m just really, really, really picky,” Elliot says, and then, realizing how that probably sounds, he frowns at himself.

“A year ago you’d tell anyone within earshot how much you hated Jonah,” Nicholas says gently. “Hell, _last month_ you’d tell anyone within earshot how much you hated Jonah. You’re asking a lot from him in the mind-reading department.”

“As I said,” Elliot says. “It’s weird.” He hoists a pile of packages out of the van and then halts.

“Some of these are from Jonah,” he says. He blanches. “Fuck, Jonah got me a _present._ ”

“Seriously, just _talk to him_ ,” Nicholas says.

“Not happening,” Elliot says, and dumps all the other packages back in the van in order to rattle his package from Jonah all the way inside.

It doesn’t smell like candy or cologne, not that he could ever imagine Jonah gifting him either. It’s clearly not a book, which is the sort of safe stodgy present Elliot imagines Jonah giving people. He doesn’t know how that makes him feel; whether it’s more or less unsettling to be one of the people Jonah _isn’t_ giving safe stodgy presents to, or whether—

“Hey, Jonah got me a present!” Blake enters the cabin, rattling his present loudly. “Maybe it’s a puzzle!”

“Why would Jonah give you a puzzle?” Elliot glowers. _His_ present from Jonah doesn’t rattle.

Blake shrugs. “I dunno. It rattles like a puzzle. Maybe it’s a terrarium. I bet terrariums rattle.”

“If it’s a terrarium, you’re killing it as we speak,” Elliot points out.

Blake gasps as if this is a new thought to him and places his gift gently under the tree. Elliot had made sure their airbnb lodge came with a pre-decorated photogenic Christmas tree. It’s filling the high-raftered open-air floor plan with the scent of spruce and peppermint.

The snow is coming down harder outside, and Elliot thinks briefly about bringing in more presents before opting to continue glaring at the one he’s holding.

Whatever this package is or isn’t, he thinks, it’s going to be a disappointment. He’s setting himself up, stupidly, to think it’s something it’s not, to think they’re careening towards something they aren’t. He’s been telling himself this for weeks, maybe even longer. But it hasn’t stopped him from feeling weirdly hopeful, and Elliot _knows_ better; he knows exactly where that leads.

And yet.

He and Jonah haven’t really talked since that night at the Hong Kong, except for the brief conversation they’d had on the drive up here, and the minor planning needed to get them all in the same place for the road trip.

Except now it’s Christmas, and Jonah’s gotten him a present.

I’m not going to ruin this, Elliot vows for the umpteenth time, even though trying to figure out what exactly he means by “this” is upsetting and confusing and easier ignored than dwelt upon.

The rough plan for Christmas Eve eve is that they will all go buy groceries and then miraculously, despite none of them knowing how to cook, create amazing, Bake-Off-worthy meals for the rest of the weekend.

What actually happens is that they order pizza and wind up sitting around playing board games from the bizarrely intense collection of board games that just happen to be sitting in the back of Blake’s mom’s SUV, that he swears he didn’t plan on bringing.

“Evil Baby Geniuses?” Elliot says, looking through the pile. “We’re supposed to, what, celebrate the birth of the baby Jesus by trying to kill baby Hitler?”

“I’m not sure that’s how the game works,” Nicholas says lightly. “I don’t think you’re supposed to immediately jump to death as the solution.”

“It’s Hitler,” Jonah points out. “I’m pretty sure you’re supposed to kill Hitler.”

“No, no,” says Caroline. “You’re supposed to give him love and affection and a decent art school education so he doesn’t grow up to become Hitler.”

“Didn’t Hitler already have those things before he became Hitler anyway?” Elliot asks.

“We can stop talking about Hitler now,” Jane says, and Elliot pulls out what looks like a Dadaist interpretation of Snakes and Ladders.

“Uh, Blake, this doesn’t seem to have a board.”

“Oh, that one’s fun,” Blake says. “We’re all supposed to take turns being the snakes and the ladders. It’s interpretative.”

“Like, we each... climb... one another?” Elliot turns and regards him in horror.

Blake nods. “And then you slide down if you land on a snake!”

Caroline slaps her hand on the kitchen island. “That’s it. We’re getting drunk and playing this immediately.”

“But how do you ascend to the point of winning the game if there’s no spatial point of ascension—” Elliot starts.

“Elliot, shush,” Caroline says, making a little shushing gesture with her hand. “Alcohol, let’s go.”

“We don’t have alcohol yet,” Jane points out. “We were going to get some on our grocery run, but then you all decided there was a blizzard happening outside and completely ignored my perfectly reasonable reminders that soon you’d be wanting alcohol that did not presently exist in the vicinity.”

“Well,” says Caroline, pouting. “That sucks, why didn’t we listen to you?”

“Eh,” says Jane. “I’m not as shrill as Elliot.”

“I’m not shrill,” Elliot says, a bit shrilly.

“Why don’t I make an alcohol run,” Jonah says, quite reasonably, “while you all figure out how to play three-dimensional snakes and ladders.”

“Jonah is our king,” says Jane. “Elliot, go with him.”

“Why me?”

“Because,” Jane says placidly, “Whatever the rules to three-dimensional snakes and ladders are, you’re going to want to critique them and turn them into something even more outlandishly ridiculous than whatever we start out with, and we can deal with you much better if we, A, work out what the rules are first, and B, start drinking before you start doing your Elliot thing.”

“Well,” says Elliot. “That’s. Well.”

“Also because, C, we just like making you and Jonah do things together,” Caroline adds. Elliot scowls at her. She claps her hands. “See! That’s your horrified-over-Jonah face.”

“I don’t have a horrified-over-Jonah face!” Elliot says, horrified.

“It’s okay, it’s a good face,” Nicholas says, patting him on the back.

“I think we should try to form a human pyramid,” says Blake, and Jonah silently tugs Elliot back outside before he can object.

He objects anyway, and spends the first two minutes or so of the ride into town going over all the ways in which a three-dimensional Snakes and Ladders is temporally ridiculous, until Jonah asks, “Are you sure you’re not just annoyed you didn’t think of it yourself first?”

“I’m entirely the opposite of annoyed,” Elliot huffs. “What, you think I’m _jealous_ over a party game?”

Jonah hums noncommittally. “You and Blake have an interesting relationship.”

“Well, so do you,” Elliot counters, looking out the window so Jonah won’t see whatever his face is doing.

“Me and Blake? We're not even close.”

“He’s always trying to get your approval.”

“Lots of people are always trying to get my approval,” Jonah says curtly. He glances over at Elliot and then adds, sounding a bit rueful, “Not that you’d notice.”

“I notice,” Elliot mutters. “But Blake practically turns into a walking ‘notice me, senpai’ meme around you.”

“I like Blake. He’s nice. Maybe I will star in his one-man _Braveheart_ reenactment.” Jonah is looking steadfastly at the road and not at Elliot, so it takes a horrified moment for Elliot to study his face and detect a telltale twitch of amusement.

“You’re horrible,” he declares. Jonah grins. Elliot crosses his arms. “You and Blake definitely deserve each other.”

“You know,” Jonah says, still sounding amused, “I’ve seen you up in arms over a staggering number of hilariously insignificant things over the years, but getting jealous over Blake is a reach even for you.”

“I’m not jealous!” Elliot protests. “He’s just, just ridiculous.”

“You _like_ that he’s ridiculous,” Jonah says. “That’s why you’re friends.”

“Do _you_ like that he’s ridiculous?” Elliot blurts, and then wishes he hadn’t.

“I like that Blake has never met a single human he didn’t want to invite to the weird Dadaist party in his head,” Jonah says, and Elliot kind of has to turn and look at him.

Jonah glances at him, and his smile changes. It’s still a grin, but now — Elliot doesn’t quite know how he can tell, but he knows Jonah’s grinning because of _him_.

“The two of you are strangely alike in a lot of ways,” says Jonah, “except that you’ve apparently only ever met three people you didn’t want to exclude on sight.”

“I don’t exclude — _everyone_ else,” Elliot says, but even as he says it he knows that’s more or less a complete lie.

“I think Blake probably wasn’t the center of the party very often when he was a kid,” Jonah says. “You’ve always been and always expected to be, no matter what you do. Blake just wants to be included, so he shoots darts at the wall until he does something wacky enough to be noticed.”

“You’ve thought about this a lot,” Elliot says. His stomach twists painfully.

Jonah shoots him a look. “Well, I had plenty of time to mull it over while you were off partying without me.”

“Are you regretting you came this weekend?” Elliot asks. “Why _did_ you come this weekend?”

Jonah laughs. “Why on earth wouldn’t I want to spend the holiday in a beautiful snow-ensconced winter wonderland with friends?”

“Because as you’ve just pointed out, the friends have a habit of pointedly excluding you.”

Jonah snorts. “No, Elliot, they don’t. That’s just you.”

Elliot winces.

“And I’m more or less used to you, by now,” Jonah says. “Mostly.”

Forcing himself to unclench his fists, Elliot takes a breath and says, as calmly as he can, “That night at the Hong Kong. I didn’t—”

“It’s fine, Elliot,” Jonah says.

“It isn’t fine,” Elliot tries. “I don’t want you to think I’m — that I don’t...”

He lapses into a confused silence that Jonah cuts a moment later by injecting, softly, “We were both a little drunk and carried away. And I was a bit of an asshole, and I’m sorry for that. Honestly, it’s fine.”

“You got me a present,” Elliot says. “I didn’t... I didn’t get you anything.”

Jonah swallows. “I wasn’t expecting you to.”

He looks at Elliot, all traces of his smile faded.

“I don’t think,” he starts. Then he sighs. “I’d prefer you wait to open it — your present — until we’re back in Boston, actually.”

“Why?”

Jonah grimaces. “I’d rather not make a big production out of it, is all.”

“Prominently not opening my present from you won’t exactly be undramatic,” Elliot points out.

"I know," Jonah admits. Then he adds, "I'm really not even sure why I brought it," more to himself than to Elliot, and Elliot clamps down hard on the urge to ask him what the fuck any of this means.

He goes for levity instead. "Well, now _you're_ being dramatic," he says, grinning at him.

"Fair." Jonah waits a moment and then deadpans, "But it's hot when I do it."

"I can be sexy and dramatic," Elliot says, arch. "I just prefer to be subtle instead."

"Never in four years have I ever known you to be subtle," Jonah says, amused. "But if you'd like to start, you can be subtle about not opening your present."

"That's completely against the aesthetic of Christmas," Elliot huffs.

Jonah laughs outright.

"It is!" Elliot protests. "What part of Christmas is subtle?"

“Lots of things,” Jonah says. They pull into the parking lot of Whole Foods and he kills the ignition, then turns to Elliot. “The way the air tastes like winter. The way you can watch the people around you being the most extra versions of themselves and yet still feel complicated and happy and tired and messy all at once. The way you can catch someone’s eyes across the room and feel like they’ve just kissed you under the mistletoe even though all you’ve done is look at each other.”

Elliot takes a moment to find his voice. “I think all of that is drama,” he says. “It’s just internal. That’s what makes it good.” Even as he speaks, he’s sinking into the warmth of Jonah’s eyes, the softness of his expression, and he’s right, there’s nothing subtle about this at all.

Jonah tilts his head and continues to regard Elliot with that same steady gaze. He says eventually, “You don’t internalize, though, do you? Even if it starts out that way. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone so completely inside of their own head who’s also incapable of staying there.”

“You think I, what, overthink everything and then yell about it loudly,” Elliot says. It’s not really a question. “Like what you said at the bar.”

“I didn’t mean what I said at the bar.”

“You think I’m going to mock you,” Elliot realizes. “You don’t want me to open your present in front of everyone else because... you don’t trust that I wouldn’t turn it into some kind of game or a joke at your expense.”

Jonah is silent. It’s not an accusing silence; he’s just waiting. Somehow that makes it all worse.

“I don’t... have a very good track record with you, do I,” Elliot says softly. “I exclude you, you have to get used to me, you’re afraid I’m going to mock you.”

“And yet,” says Jonah, and then he doesn’t say anything. Elliot looks at him. He thinks about all the times over the years that Jonah has wryly allowed Elliot to shamelessly use and abuse their friendship, in countless ways, from note-copying to ride-begging to the time Jonah ran into him in the middle of a full-fledged term paper breakdown and trekked across campus solely to fetch him a book on stage direction at the 11th hour. He brought back the book and one or two more, plus some coffee and donuts and packets of vitamin C. Elliot was so grateful to him he could have cried, but he can’t remember telling him so. He knows on some level he’s resented Jonah’s kindnesses, all granted without complaint or score-keeping, though he’s never really considered why before. He wonders about all the other times he’s missed, all the ways Jonah has been a better friend to him than he’s deserved.

Jane said that Jonah was nothing but soft spots.

“Snow’s coming down harder,” Jonah says, while Elliot is still processing all of this. He hops out of the van, and Elliot follows.

“Hey,” Elliot says as they’re walking inside. He’s trailing behind Jonah, whose scarf is extra-long, dangling below his waist, making him look even taller than normal, and Elliot catches up to him and gives it a tug before he can second-guess himself. “I don’t want — I don’t want to be the person in your life you have to get used to,” he says.

Jonah stops and regards him for a moment. “Well,” he says after a moment, consideringly. “I’m afraid you’re years too late for that, so you’ll just have to start surprising me.”

“Surprising you. How?”

“If I told you, I wouldn’t be very surprised, would I?”

“You know, I don’t think the others properly appreciate that if I have a specific horrified-over-you expression,” Elliot feels the need to point out, “It’s probably because you’re _being horrifying_.”

“I’m pretty sure this is technically called flirting,” Jonah says.

“You say that like flirting isn’t horrifying.” Elliot’s stomach does an odd series of flip-flops anyway.

“I’m quite certain everyone else thinks flirting with me is a pleasure,” Jonah says, long-suffering.

“Everyone else isn’t me,” Elliot mutters, and Jonah halts for a moment in his stupidly long coat and his stupidly long scarf and fixes his stupidly gorgeous eyes on Elliot like he’s just said something significant. Elliot turns in the store entrance, and they look at each other, another one of those moments where they just seem to get stuck, and time and space and everything else sort of gets stuck too.

“No,” Jonah says softly. “That they aren’t.”

Once inside they bicker quite pleasantly over cocktail mixes and margarita ingredients and how much artisanal cider to get for Nicholas, and then Elliot suggests that they might as well get food for breakfast in the morning, because after all this drinking nobody’s going to be fit to drive anywhere to do the shopping then, so they wind up with a hilarious mix of booze and cider and eggs and cinnamon rolls and sausage, and it’s weirdly fun.

“This is weirdly fun,” he tells Jonah at the checkout line.

“What a thrilling shot to my ego,” Jonah responds dryly.

“I’m sorry I didn’t get you a present. I should have gotten you a present.”

“Well,” Jonah says. “Sing another duet with me some time and we’ll call it even.”

“Just singing?” Elliot asks. “Sure you don’t want to break into a spontaneous rumba?”

“That would be highly unfortunate for everyone involved.”

“You probably took ballroom lessons as a kid,” Elliot says, and then he winces a little. He’s tried to be better — that is, he tries, nowadays, to avoid bringing up Jonah’s childhood. Jonah doesn’t look mad or upset about it, though.

“I definitely learned how to waltz and how to foxtrot.” He makes a face, like he’s remembering the torture of going through dance lessons as a gangly teen. Elliot suppresses a grin at the thought. “The rumba was a bit beyond twelve-year-old me, though.”

The person standing behind them in line at the checkout snorts, and Elliot speeds up his grocery-bagging.

“I’ve seen you dance,” Elliot says, looking steadfastly at the bags of groceries he’s organizing and not at Jonah’s face. “The rumba is definitely not beyond you.”

“I’ve never seen you dance,” Jonah says, and Elliot spares a moment to be grateful he doesn’t ask any follow-ups, so Elliot doesn’t have to confess that he watched all Jonah’s dance scenes in _Thoroughly Modern Millie_ last fall more times than he cares to admit. “But I have a feeling you’d make it work.”

“It seems a sad commentary on the state of the world that there’s no reason for people to learn to rumba,” Elliot says. “And no reason for people to spontaneously dance on rooftops and things.”

“That seems like precisely the kind of scheme you’d invent.”

“What, dancing on a rooftop?” Elliot bites back a smile. “Even supposing I could find a rooftop _and_ arrange the music _and_ learn the rumba, who am I going to dance with?”

“I imagine,” Jonah says, “the person who can do all that will have no shortage of dance partners when the moment comes.”

“None of them will be Scott Hastings, though,” Elliot says plaintively.

“However shall you endure such hardship,” Jonah replies, and Elliot thinks he’s probably gotten used to Jonah, too, because there was a time when this kind of retort from Jonah would have sent him into a flying sulk for days.

Now, though, he just elbows Jonah in the side and carts all the groceries to the van, and they fall into a strangely relaxed silence for most of the ride back to the cabin, with Elliot still pondering all the questions Jonah's left him with.  _And yet._

When they get back, arms full of groceries, they find Caroline and Blake arguing over whether climbing a person like a ladder should involve actual climbing, or whether it’s enough to simply hoist the player onto one's shoulders for the duration of the turn. Jane gestures to Elliot and dives for the first beer she comes to in his grocery haul.

“You could wait for the margaritas, you know.”

“No time,” she says. “How was your road trip?”

“With Jonah? He’s literally two feet away from me,” Elliot points out.

“Jonah, don’t listen to us,” says Jane.

“I haven’t heard a word,” Jonah says dutifully, his head buried in the refrigerator.

“Jane, dearest,” Elliot says. “Did you send us out for groceries so we could Talk?”

“Did you just capitalize Talk with your voice?” Jane asks.

“Possibly.”

“Possibly,” Jane says. “Did you?”

“Did we what?”

“Did you Talk?”

“We bonded over _Strictly Ballroom_ and how weird Blake is.”

“I heard that,” says Blake. “Wait, you and Jonah talked about me?”

“I’m drinking all the margaritas,” says Elliot.

“You don’t even like margaritas,” Nicholas points out.

“Irrelevant,” Elliot answers. “None of you deserve them.”

“Can’t drink them if you don’t make them, Elliot,” Caroline says, patting him on the cheek and then elbowing him out of the way. “Back off, I’m going to start mixing.”

“But we’re not done negotiating the bannister slide,” says Blake.

“Do you want to show me how to ice skate?” Elliot asks Jonah, and after Jonah, faint surprise flickering over his face, haltingly agrees, Elliot tugs him back out into the crisp night air.

The pond is just out back, down a gently sloping lawn bracketed by snowy woods on either side. A few lamp posts illuminate the edges of the pond, and its smooth, snow-dusted surface. It really is very Courier and Ives.

“No skating on this,” Jonah says, stepping out onto the ice. Elliot follows cautiously after; the snow makes it easy to walk on.

It’s totally silent out here, in that deep pure silence you only get during a winter snowfall. He thinks about how all it took for this, whatever this is between the two of them, to unravel was a tiny shift, a momentary break in the noise of Elliot’s life.  

He wonders, if he stays out here long enough, listening to the silence, what parts of himself he’ll hear echoing back.

He turns to Jonah. “Dancing, then,” he says. He steps into Jonah’s space.

Jonah looks at him quizzically. “You have no idea how to rumba. I have no idea how to rumba.”

Elliot shrugs. “We can figure something out.” He holds his hand out.

Jonah fixes him with a level, wary look, and Elliot wonders for a moment if he’ll say no. But then he laughs and steps forward and takes Elliot’s hand. His arm comes around Elliot’s waist with such ease it leaves Elliot breathless for a moment.

“I think you’re supposed to move on two,” Elliot offers.  

“Surely there’s a pick-up,” Jonah says, demonstrating, and Elliot moves with him, instinctively, and nearly steps on his foot. Jonah laughs again. “And then pause on the downbeat.” Elliot counts off on two, and they try again, and this time they mostly get it right, except they don’t have any idea which direction to move. But when they work that out, suddenly it snaps together, and it’s... not half bad.

Elliot is looking down at their feet when Jonah sings softly under his breath, “You won’t admit you love me.”

Elliot starts and looks up at him. Jonah leaves the rest of the verse unsung just to drive the words home, and Elliot gulps and forces himself to say something, anything.

“I’m not good at,” Elliot tries, and then he stops and starts over. “Nicholas keeps telling me to talk to you,” he says, and then realizes that’s probably also not the best way to start. He rushes forward. “I think I probably owe you a lot of words and probably none of them will make any sense, but I’m not — I’m not avoiding this any longer.”

Jonah’s expression doesn’t change, but his eyes are fixed on Elliot, and Elliot notices all at once that the hand holding his is trembling ever so slightly, and the realization that Jonah is _nervous_ collides with all Elliot's own giddy anxiety for some sort of double somersault in his stomach.

 _Talk_ , he orders himself.

“You like people,” he says. “You like people, and you _love_ sex, and you just, you’re so open about it.” He knows he’s turning red, and this is all just awful, but he swallows and keeps going. “I... don’t. I don’t like most people. And I... sex is... weird, with me.” He looks down. “I mean. You know all this about me anyway. Not many people do and you’re one of them.”

“But I never meant to make you uncomfortable, Elliot, or make you feel judged for any of it,” Jonah interjects, and Elliot impulsively squeezes the hand still clasped in his.

“No, but I saw how easy you were with people, and how, just, _you_ , you are,” he says. “And it all got bound up together — the way I feel about, like, sex in general, and people in general, and the way I felt — feel — about you. And it was just... so much easier.”

“To... decide you hated me along with hating sex?” Jonah asks softly.

“To judge you,” Elliot answers. “To judge all of it. Because if I judged you, I wouldn’t have to— to _deal_ with this. Because dealing with this is _horrible_.”

“It doesn’t have to be,” Jonah says softly, and he reaches up to cup Elliot’s cheek in his hand, and they’re standing outside in the snow so there’s no earthly reason for the touch to burn Elliot the way it does, but oh, it does.

“But it is,” Elliot tells him, biting his lip furiously to keep it from trembling. “Because I don’t... I don’t really know how I work yet. And I don’t know how to ask you to try this, with me, because, because what if it turns out that I’ve gotten this all wrong, and that I’m, it’s all some kind of fluke?”

“But how will you know unless you try?” Jonah asks him. “How will you ever know how it works if you don’t give yourself the opportunity of finding out?”

“But this way I wouldn’t take you down with me,” Elliot says unhappily, heart hammering in his chest.

Jonah’s thumb comes down to stroke Elliot’s lip, and Elliot gasps.

“Elliot,” Jonah says, “that is complete bullshit,” and he kisses him.

“Oh,” Elliot breathes, a lifetime later, after they break apart.

“Precisely,” Jonah says, and kisses him again.

“But what if I break everything and you hate me,” Elliot persists the next time they come up for air.

“I won’t hate you _nearly_ as much then as I will right this second if you don’t stop talking and come here,” Jonah responds, and he wraps his arms around Elliot’s waist and pulls Elliot even closer, using the slide of the ice. Which is totally cheating, but the moment their lips meet again Elliot forgets to tell him.

He shudders and shifts closer, and yeah, that height difference seems to have worked itself out perfectly now, and when Jonah shivers against him, it slides through Elliot in a tremor of heat.

“Is this okay,” Jonah murmurs against his temple, raspy and breathless. “You have to tell me if it’s too—”

“This is perfect,” Elliot insists. “This is, this is, fuck, forget everything I said earlier, I like sex now.”

Jonah snorts and kisses Elliot’s forehead. “You're impossible,” he says, still laughing. He tilts Elliot’s chin up to kiss the line of his jaw. Elliot lets out a tiny yelp of pleasure. “But if this is all part of figuring out what works and doesn’t work for you,” Jonah continues, “then please, let me help.”

“Oh, my god,” Elliot says. “We need to be inside right now.”

They sneak quietly in through the back door and up the backstairs without ever being noticed by the others, who are presumably still in the great room trying to build human pyramids. They’re back down through the upstairs corridor to all the bedrooms, stopping to kiss and fumble and get their hands on each other, and then finally they’re to the first doorway of somebody’s bedroom and Jonah is pushing inside and then onto the bed, tugging his shirt over his head in one ridiculously hot movement and then pressing himself against Elliot like he belongs there, and he does, he _does_ , and Elliot pulls him close and kisses him so deep he can feel the moment Jonah runs out of air and shudders against him, breaking the kiss with a gasp. He cups Elliot’s cheek and strokes Elliot’s mouth with his thumb, brushing his nose against Elliot’s, and it’s so close, so intimate, and Elliot doesn’t know how he ended up here. He doesn’t know how it took him _so long_ to end up here.

Jonah laces their fingers together and bends to kiss the underside of Elliot’s jaw, and Elliot shivers and arches beneath him. He’s never like this, he never wants to be _touched_ like this, but he can’t stop looking at Jonah, running his hands over Jonah’s skin, wanting, wanting.

“Wait, wait,” he manages to get out, even though he’s not sure if he’s ordering Jonah or himself. Jonah pauses with one hand on Elliot’s stomach and the other propped on the bed, hovering over him.

“Okay, first of all,” Elliot says, looking around wildly, “Whose room is this?”

“No idea,” Jonah says without looking around at all. “Next.”

“You have about 80 times more experience at this than I do,” Elliot says, reaching up and running his hand through Jonah’s thick shock of hair.

“Elliot,” Jonah replies, “I couldn’t tell you a single thing about any of those other times right now if you asked me.”

“Oh,” Elliot croons. Jonah kisses him again.

“I’m sorry I called you a _Rent_ gay that one time,” Elliot says. “And that time I said you were a one-man summer stock _Pirates of Penzance_.”

Jonah bursts into laughter. “Please don’t start down the apology path, I’d like to have an orgasm before Christmas.”

Elliot sits up. “I’m serious about this,” he says. “I need you to know that.”

Jonah takes both of Elliot’s hands in his. “So am I,” he says.

“But I can’t do this and be one of a crowd,” Elliot adds. “At least not yet, anyway.”

“I promise you,” Jonah answers him, kissing his wrist, “I have had enough shallow sex to last a lifetime. I haven’t even begun to get enough of you.”

“Fuck, you’re really good at this,” Elliot says. He climbs into Jonah’s lap and registers his appreciation.

“But Elliot.” Jonah pulls away long enough for Elliot to register the hint of anxiety in his eyes. “Don’t mock me.”

“I swear,” Elliot says. “I’ve never felt less ironic.” He bites Jonah’s collarbone to emphasize his point.

“Interesting,” Jonah says, grinning. “I think this is the most ironic either of us has ever been.”

“Everyone’s going to know,” Elliot says. “About us. After tonight.”

“Are you okay with that?”

Elliot beams at him. “Am I okay with people knowing that I _seduced_ you?” Jonah makes a face. “That I _caught, tamed, and captured_ this notorious rake?”

Jonah rolls his eyes heavenward. “I’m rapidly beginning to understand that there should be limits to talking during foreplay,” he says. Elliot leans forward and links his arms around Jonah’s neck.

“That out of everyone in the world, all those people who want you, who want your attention, I’m your _favorite_ ,” he whispers. He noses Jonah’s cheek.

“You are of course completely delusional,” Jonah says, skating his warm hand over Elliot’s back.

“I mean, if you tell me this isn’t a massive ego-stroke for you, too, I probably won’t believe you,” Elliot adds.

“And yet somehow the more you talk about how great you are the less I believe it.” He leans in and bites Elliot’s earlobe as he says it, though, and Elliot buries his face against Jonah’s neck.

“That’s such a lie,” he says happily. “You think I’m amazing. You think we’re going to be some kind of power couple. You’re already planning how humiliating next year’s Christmas card power couple photoshoot is going to be.”

“I was mainly planning to take your clothes off,” Jonah responds, unbuttoning the collar of Elliot’s Blank Label, “but I rarely object to thinking ahead.”

Elliot turns his face into Jonah’s collarbone and breathes him in. “I don’t hate you at all,” he murmurs, and lets Jonah bear him down to the bed.

 

 

In the morning, Elliot wakes to the sensation of, there’s really no other word for it, _snuggling_. As he gradually adjusts to the realization that his own arms are wrapped around another warm body, a jolt of mortification shoots through him, quickly followed by a strange, calm reassurance when he remembers where he is and who he’s with. He takes a moment to breathe it all in — the coziness, the luxurious feeling of being well-shagged, the way all his limbs feel simultaneously heavy and light, the feeling of Jonah’s chest rising and falling under Elliot’s palm where it’s draped over him. And then thinks that as long as he’s in it now, might as well go all in, so he burrows closer against Jonah’s side. A moment later, fingers thread lazily through his hair.

“No, don’t wake up, it’s too early to be awake,” he mumbles, turning his head into Jonah’s shoulder.

“How do you know,” comes Jonah’s voice, rumbly and amused.

“Because I’m _awake_ ,” Elliot whines, yawning pointedly. Jonah lifts his head and shifts onto his side, shoving Elliot over to sling his arm around Elliot’s waist. Elliot grumbles at him, but that quickly turns into a purr when Jonah presses a kiss against his neck. He pulls Jonah’s arm around him more tightly, and they cuddle like that for a moment.

“On a scale of one to ten,” Jonah says after a moment, “how mortified are you right now?”

“I’m trying not to fling myself out the nearest window,” Elliot says. He moans in despair when Jonah smiles against his skin. “God, stop being so _warm_.”

“You want me to move?” Jonah says, smug.

“No,” says Elliot. He laces their fingers together. Then, “Fuck you,” he adds, without any heat.

Jonah wraps him up without another word.

“We should go downstairs,” he mumbles into Elliot’s hair some time later. “Make coffee for everyone before they wake up.”

Elliot processes this and slowly opens his eyes. He rolls over and stares.

“Like a _Folgers commercial_?”

Jonah looks sleepy and unrepentant. _Ugh_ , Elliot thinks. “You’re married to a Hallmark card now, best get used to it.”

“You are disgusting,” says Elliot, unable to help leaning in and rubbing his nose against Jonah’s.

“I like breakfast,”  Jonah answers. “I can’t wait to hear you loudly object to everything you insisted we buy at the store last night.”

“I like breakfast,” Elliot murmurs. “I like sleep more.”

Jonah leans up and kisses him on the forehead. “Sleep,” he says. ”I’ll make coffee.”

“No, ugh, _fine_ ,” Elliot says mulishly, and Jonah breaks into a broad grin. Elliot sits up and grimaces at the sunlight streaking the room. “Not even a day and I’m already becoming a morning person, soon you’re going to have me whistling chipper Disney melodies as I saunter around the kitchen making pancakes and consulting Mary Berry to make sure my pastry bottoms aren’t soggy.”

Jonah arches his eyebrows. “Is there _anything_ you aren’t dramatic about?”

“Not this early,” Elliot says, turning up his nose.

When they finally make it downstairs, however, it's anything but dramatic; it's soft and cozy and domestic, and Elliot fusses over the coffeemaker and lets Jonah back him against the counter and kiss him after he gives up on slow-drip espresso and successfully brews a whole pot of store-bought medium roast, and then he wraps his arms around Jonah's waist and directs the making of eggs and French toast and pancakes while regularly burrowing his face against Jonah's shoulder, because Jonah is so warm and easy to cuddle, and here all this time Elliot had spent telling himself Jonah would be hard and cold and bony and standoffish, but, no, Jonah is a giant pillow, a giant pillow that occasionally nudges him and leans back to ruffle Elliot's hair and passes spoons of batter over his shoulder for Elliot to sample, and Elliot is trying his best not to freak out about how much he wants them to do this every morning when Caroline wanders sleepily into the kitchen and says, “These pancakes had better taste like cupids frolicking on Mount Olympus to atone for—”

“Don’t say it,” Jonah interrupts smoothly. “We're all adults and it's not as if you and Nicholas were exactly subtle last night.”

Caroline just smirks. And smirks. “God,” Elliot says, digging his fingers into Jonah's waistband and attempting to sink into the floor. “I knew you'd, god, stop smiling at me, you get no breakfast.”

“I can’t stop smiling,” Caroline beams at him. “Look at the two of you.”

“I mean it, I'm giving all your pancakes to the snowman,” Elliot grumbles. “I don't think cupids frolic anyway.”

Caroline leans over the countertop to steal a strawberry from the pile Elliot has been haphazardly de-pitting.  “Did you tell him about the concert?” she asks.

It takes Elliot a moment to realize she’s addressing Jonah, who blithely leans past him to grab the powdered sugar and says, “No idea what you mean.”

Caroline narrows her eyes at him. “Jonah,” she says.  Jonah starts whistling and pointedly busies himself with the French toast. Elliot looks back and forth between them and then settles on glaring meaningfully at Caroline, who’s never been able to keep secrets from him even if she’s wanted to.

“That’s not a no,” Caroline says at last, and she leans over the countertop conspiratorially. “Okay,” she tells Elliot. “Last year when you were freaking out because you had that presentation or whatever so you couldn’t stand in line for Fleet Foxes tickets.”

“Right,” Elliot says. “And they sold out in minutes and I was so upset, but you got a pair anyway because you’re the best friend ever, and we went and it was amazing.”

Caroline looks guilty and nods her head at Jonah. “I’m not the best friend ever,” she says plaintively.

Elliot stares. Jonah’s still ignoring them, but he’s practically drowning one poor batch of French toast with powdered sugar, and Elliot reaches out to stop him.

“Jonah,” he says, and Jonah straightens with a sigh and brushes sugar from his hands before he turns and regards Elliot.

“He gave them to me to give to you,” Caroline says. “When I asked him why he didn’t just give them to you himself, he said the timing wasn’t right.”

Jonah shrugs and says unconcernedly, “It wasn’t.”

“ _Jonah_ ,” Elliot says again. He reaches up and cups Jonah’s face in his hand and thinks about how long a part of him has wanted to do that. He can’t imagine doing anything like it a year ago. A year ago he was too busy trying to bury all of this beneath as much distraction as possible. Still, he wonders.

“You got two tickets,” Elliot says. “You could have just _asked_ me.”

“I wanted you to have a good time,” Jonah says. “You wouldn’t have had a good time if you were worrying about me all night.”

“Okay, we really need to have a chat about your martyr complex,” Elliot says. Jonah grins and slides his own hand over Elliot’s.

“Oh, I really don’t think we need to do that at all,” he says, grinning a little.

“Any other terrible secrets you need to unburden?” Elliot asks, raising an eyebrow in Caroline’s direction.

“I think that one will do,” Jonah says smoothly.

“I'm just saying,” Caroline says, reaching up to ruffle Elliot’s hair. “It’s about time. And I’m going to tease you both about this for the rest of our natural lives.”

Elliot sniffs. “I don’t know what you mean, my emotional affairs are entirely mock-proof.”

Caroline snorts. She grabs a spoon and feigns speaking grandly into a mic. “Hear ye, hear ye,” she says, clearing her throat. “I, Elliot, shall now present my thesis entitled ‘13 Treatises on Jonah Talbot’s Complete Insufferability,’ in which I fool no one except myself.”

“That never happened!” Elliot swats at her ineffectually.

“Treatise number one,” she says, winking at him. “He doesn’t pay me nearly enough attention at parties and flirts with everyone else but me, leaving me nothing to do but opine to anyone who’ll listen that he’s a scandalous reprobate and I definitely don’t like him at all.”

“That — I don’t — that is a _blatant_ mischaracterization, you’re terrible at impersonating me,” Elliot says. Caroline cackles.

“Treatise number two,” she continues, waving her spoon-mic in his face. “Jonah Talbot has refused to take my advice and desist from wearing smoking jackets even after I pointed out that they make him look like a goth Victorian Oscar Wilde cosplayer, a fact for which I cannot forgive him, which is undoubtedly why I cannot stop staring at him every time he wears one.”

“Okay, I get it,” Elliot says, feeling himself flush.

“Oh, no, this is highly interesting,” Jonah says. “Pray, continue.” Elliot glares up at him. Jonah winks and kisses him on the forehead.

“Ooh, are we making fun of Elliot?” Jane comes up behind Caroline and steals another strawberry. “I’m always up for this game.”

Caroline slings an arm around Jane’s shoulder. “We’re recounting the past history of Elliot’s ridiculous love-hate for Jonah now that they’ve finally gotten themselves together,” she explains.

Elliot groans. “No. No, we’re not playing that game. You, especially, are not allowed to play this game.”

“Oh, I think I am _especially_ allowed to play this game,” Jane says with a grin. Caroline passes her the spoon-mic.

Jane says, “So like: ‘I’m Elliot and I’ve never gotten over the one time when we were still brand-new freshmen, and Jonah trolled me for days by making me think he legitimately thought Sondheim was boring, and even though it quickly became clear that he was just baiting me when he accidentally-on-purpose let me see his shrine to _Sunday in the Park with George_ , I’m still obsessed with his trick four years later, and I bring it up at every opportunity, because I can only do geeky musical theatre flirting if I can frame it as a war between two opponents rather than awkward interactions between two people who desperately want to fuck.”

“ _Desperately_ ,” Jonah says, and Elliot, despairing, declares his intense hatred for everyone in the room and steals the opportunity to bury his head against Jonah's chest. Jonah winds his arms around Elliot’s waist and pulls him close.

“Alright, you’ve had your fun,” Jonah says. Caroline sticks her tongue out at him. “I'm officially chasing you two out of the kitchen. Spread the word that residents will be allowed entrance only if they can keep from mortifying the chefs.”

“I just got here,” says Jane. “This is an outrage.”

“I’m not above putting milk in all of your tea,” Elliot tells her. She gasps.

“So this is how it’s to be now?” she says, putting a hand to her heart. “Now that you’ve found love, your brilliant and scathing friends aren’t allowed to be brilliant and scathing? Twist the knife a little further.”

Still, she comes around the island and wraps her arms around Elliot from behind him, so he suspects she’s not really too hurt.

“Don’t freak out, but you seem really happy,” she says against his shoulder.

“I’m already freaking out,” he says mutinously, even as he reaches back to pat her head in a way he hopes registers as affectionate.

“We’re managing it,” Jonah says amusedly. “Thank you for your support in this trying time.” He’s in a better position than Elliot is to hug Jane, and it makes Elliot feel a bit warm inside when he loosens his hold around Elliot’s waist to put his hand on Jane’s arm.

“You’re all really gross right now,” says Caroline. “Ugh.” She joins the hug pile from the side, wrapping her arms around Jane and Jonah and snuggling her cheek against Elliot.

“I can’t believe you were Jonah’s, like, Secret-Keeper all this time,” Elliot tells her.  “It seems I underestimated you, a mistake I shan’t be making again.”

Caroline grins. “Please, you’re going to be too busy shagging your nemesis to worry about the rest of us.”

“ _Never_ ,” Elliot declares, and her grin gets bigger.

“Okay, enough of this.” Jane ruffles Elliot’s hair and separates. “Come on,” she says, tugging at Caroline’s elbow. “They clearly want to make out in the kitchen, let’s leave them to their domestic fantasy.”

“Elliot and domestic, two words I would never have put together,” says Caroline.

“Shh,” Jane says fondly. “He’s riding a dopamine high, we’ll allow it this once.”

Caroline reaches out to muss Elliot's hair. “I want blueberries with my pancakes,” she says, and the two of them depart.

“I don’t understand anything that just happened,” Elliot gripes.

“The important bit is that your friends are happy for you,” Jonah says.

“For _us_ ,” Elliot points out. “They’re your friends, too.”

“Yes, but you’re their soft spot,” Jonah says, smiling a little.

“Really.” Elliot tucks his chin against Jonah’s shoulder. “Jane said that, too.” He can’t resist nipping Jonah’s ear. “She said you’re nothing but soft spots.”

“For you?” Jonah pulls back. “She sees a lot from California.”

“She pays attention,” Elliot says. “That’s Jane.” He snakes a hand into Jonah’s hair. “Or maybe you’re just blindingly obvious.”

“To everyone but you, apparently,” Jonah says.

“Hey,” Elliot says. Jonah’s hair is so thick, wavy and soft and a bit like dandelion fluff under his fingertips. Elliot wonders how many times in the past he’s suppressed the urge to touch him like this. “You have to admit I’m catching up fast.”

Jonah hums and maneuvers Elliot against the counter and kisses him, and they stay there until the next batch of pancakes start to burn.

 

 

The rest of Christmas Eve day passes in a blur of kisses and contentment, and Elliot spends most of it smiling like an idiot. Elliot’s usually subtle when it comes to relationships; he’s not one for gratuitous, showy affection, and he’s usually mortified when other people around him are. But he can’t stop himself from being drawn into Jonah’s arms, into his orbit, into the warm clasp of Jonah’s hand reaching for him if Elliot moves away for too long; and he knows this is all just part of the first flush of any relationship, but it’s also new and intense and intimate. He feels stupefied by the sheer strange marvel of it all, the two of them finding their way together; he feels pinned down by the broadside of emotion he feels when he looks at Jonah’s face and finds it breaking open into a broad, helpless grin whenever their eyes meet.

But there’s a strange sadness in all of it, too. A part of him feels wildly uncertain over this shift into this new reality, away from the days when he could obliviously cling to Nicholas and mock Jonah without knowing what it all meant, towards the adult awareness they all share with each other now, him and Nicholas and Caroline and Jonah. Nicholas keeps smiling at him softly, like he’s so _proud_ of Elliot for figuring himself out, and Elliot keeps wanting to stick his tongue out at him or flip him the bird, but instead he nuzzles into Jonah’s shoulder and bickers with him idly about the merits of various Christmas songs, the merits of Mariah Carey’s career outside of “All I Want For Christmas,” and the merits of Jonah’s unacceptably beautiful manicured hands.

And, too, he feels painfully certain this is a moment that will never come again, all of them here together like this — that next year, after graduation, they’ll all have become caught up in their own lives, their own journeys pulling them away from each other. It’s already happened with Jane, and even though she’s always full of promises to return to Boston, she’s putting down roots out west, and he knows that she feels she has bequeathed him to Jonah, in a sense, that she’s happy he’s found a new keeper in her absence. He is a glass half-full with wonder and love, and half-empty with wistfulness.

They have snowball fights, and make snow angels, and then snowmen, which in Blake’s case becomes an absurdist snow fort, and then they all make spiced cider and try to squeeze themselves into the snow fort to drink the cider, and after the fort inevitably collapses they stumble indoors where the fire is flickering and everything’s toasty and the great room sofas are huge and irresistibly cozy, and Nicholas makes some sort of amazing artisanal hot cocoa for them and Caroline and Blake decide to roast marshmallows over the living room fireplace. Someone has over-ambitiously begun a 1500-piece Norman Rockwell puzzle, so Elliot curls up between Jane and Jonah and drinks his cocoa and works on finding all the border pieces.

Jane says, “Tell me about your year,” and Elliot looks back and sees a year full of nothing much, but countless little moments: scores of karaoke nights, and pleasantly combative spats with Jonah, and the slow burn of Caroline and Nicholas’s romance steadily capturing more of his awareness, and the embarrassing two-month love affair he had with _Crazy Ex-Girlfriend_ that he managed to keep secret until the news that Greg was coming back for the last season made him ecstatically yelp, “Aha! I _knew_ it!” in the middle of a theatre workshop, and the constant exhaustion in his bones when he was directing _Jesus Hopped the A Train_ that fall, but the deep satisfaction of walking back to his apartment across the river every night, knowing he’d done something worthwhile — not just something he was good at, but something _good_.

“I missed you,” he says instead of any of that, because it’s probably the truest thing on top of it all. “I wished you were here.”

She squeezes his hand. “I’m here now,” she says, and leans over to drop another marshmallow into his cocoa. He beams at her.

“Tell me about this,” she says, and she looks from him to Jonah.

He looks at Jonah, who is suddenly very interested in putting together Santa’s hat.

“I feel like I should be asking _you_ to tell _me_ about this,” Elliot grouses at her.

She snickers and somehow makes taking a sip of cocoa look like a sage grand gesture.

“Do you think it only happened because Nicholas and Caroline got together first,” Elliot asks hesitantly.

“Obviously, Elliot,” says Caroline from her place by the fire.

“No one asked you!”

“Hey.” Nicholas comes over and stands behind the sofa, draping a hand over Elliot’s shoulder. “You’d’ve gotten there eventually.”

“You could have _told_ me,” Elliot grouses, looking upside down at him.

“No one can tell you anything until you’re ready to hear it, Elliot,” Jane says.

“That’s completely untrue,” Elliot protests.

“Hmm.” Nicholas quirks an eyebrow at him. “Hey, Elliot, ever think maybe your whole Jonah thing is a mask for something deeper that you’re not dealing with?” Before Elliot can respond, Nicholas does it for him, in his Elliot voice, which is both shriller and raspier than Elliot is in real life. “That’s bullshit, Nicholas, here are 18 reasons why Jonah and I are completely incompatible, which I have carefully and obsessively prepared.”

“This morning it was just 13 reasons,” Jonah remarks mildly, putting a puzzle piece in place. “This is the gift that keeps on giving.”

“You’re all horrible, I’m breaking up with every one of you effective immediately,” Elliot declares.

“We love you, too,” Nicholas says, planting a kiss atop Elliot’s head. Elliot grins at him, reaches up to bat him away, but is abruptly reminded of his earlier observation that no one spares these kinds of casual affectionate touches for Jonah. It makes him reach out to trail his fingers over Jonah’s arm. Jonah pulls away from the puzzle and sits up. He shifts to pull Elliot closer, and Elliot winds up half cuddled against him, half draped over his thigh.

Nicholas climbs over the back of the sofa to squeeze into the gap Elliot has only partly vacated. “The point is that we all know you,” he says, bumping Elliot’s shoulder. “We know the louder you are when you complain about something, the more you’re working through all the angles of it in your head. So the more you complained about Jonah...” he trails off, grinning.

“I don’t do that, though,” Elliot frowns. “Do I?”

Jonah laughs. “You spent the entirety of our course on Brecht loudly declaring that he was misinterpreting German Expressionism and therefore all of his ideas about staging were fundamentally flawed,” he says, his fingers skating gently over Elliot’s neck, “only to wind up re-writing your term paper at the last minute because you’d ultimately decided he was right about everything.”

“You _loudly berated me_ for liking Taylor Swift during her 1989 phase because, quote, one good album doesn’t make up for a career of schlock,” Jane points out, “only to decide by the time she released _Reputation_ that you were actually soulmates and that in fact she was, quote, a visionary voice representing marginalized teenage girls whose natural fixation on romance shouldn’t automatically be seen as undermining their autonomy and intelligence.”

“You spent six weeks telling me Ian Purrtis was plotting to kill me,” says Nicholas.

Elliot lets out a pained noise.

“The point is,” Jonah says, pulling Elliot completely into his lap. “Soft spots.”

 

 

“Do you still want me to wait to open your present?” Elliot asks Jonah much later, when they’re burrowed under blankets and the world is hushed and silent, harkening for the clatter of hoofs on the roof.

Jonah is gently scratching Elliot’s back and it’s the best thing he’s ever felt. He keeps wriggling closer to the touch, and every time he moves, Jonah huffs a small puff of laughter over Elliot’s neck, as if Elliot _delights_ him, and maybe _that’s_ the best thing Elliot’s ever felt.

“Whatever it is, I promise I won’t laugh,” he insists. He reaches blindly behind him and flails for some part of Jonah to, like, pat comfortingly, but he mostly just ends up swatting at his thigh until Jonah sighs and wraps his arms around him.

“I mean, I didn’t get you anything at all,” Elliot reminds him guiltily. “I thought about, like, sneaking some specialty pasta into the cart last night at Whole Foods when you weren’t looking.”

Jonah laughs. “You gave me a gift,” he says. “You gave me this. Yourself.”

Elliot snorts. ”Right, the best present you’ve ever gotten.”

Jonah says blithely, “Certainly the one I wanted the longest,” and Elliot has to look at him.

He rolls over and looks at Jonah for a long time. Jonah lets him look, doesn’t seem in a hurry to speak. As if he’s content to let Elliot work through whatever’s happening in his head.

Back when they first met, Jonah’s habit of cavalierly saying grand, impossible things was one of the main reasons Elliot initially found him exasperating and insufferable. He was too, too _much_ , too impossibly unapologetically himself, and perhaps Elliot is only just now realizing that maybe Elliot is also too much. Only, where Jonah walks into a room and insists on being himself, Elliot walks into a room and flings barbs everywhere — not big ones, just ones sharp enough to draw a little blood and a lot of attention.

He takes a breath. “When I was stage-managing _The Seagull_ ,” he begins.

Jonah’s face splits into one of those huge smiles. “When you were micro-managing _The Seagull_ ,” he says blithely. Elliot huffs. “Because you should have been directing it yourself,” Jonah adds.

“Do you really think that?” Elliot asks, immediately derailing himself.

Jonah’s grin fades into a soft smile. “I did then and still do. I’d love to see you direct Chekhov. I’d love to see where you’d put all that laser-sharp focus and pent-up energy.”

Elliot gapes at him. “That’s... okay, well, you’re clearly biased and weirdly eager to overlook my tyrannical interpersonal style.” Jonah shrugs broadly and leans into kiss him. He probably means it to be a slow, gentle kiss, but it heats up rapidly, and Elliot finds himself drawing Jonah closer, shifting into his back to pull Jonah on top of him. Jonah hums into his mouth and nips at Elliot’s lower lip. “Nevermind,” Elliot gasps, “my interpersonal style is clearly just fine.”

“What were you going to say?” Jonah says, moving lower to kiss the hollow of Elliot’s throat. “It seemed important.”

Elliot says, “Hnnngh,” and then, “What? Oh. Ahh,” and wriggles and arches up for more of that. Jonah laughing against his skin is something he’s rapidly gotten used to. He threads his hands through Jonah’s hair and tugs him up to look at him.

“There was this thing you did onstage every night,” he says, and Jonah goes still, suddenly hyper-focused, fully intent on him. Elliot thinks about Jonah never getting as much physical affection as the rest of them, knows it’s because Jonah always comes off as so completely self-sufficient even though Elliot is starting to know better.

He wonders if that applies to everything else in his life, too; if Jonah, with his broken family ties and his lack of settled relationships, has missed out on the chance to be coddled and spoiled and praised for his work like every other kid his age — because god, he’s still only 22, he’s still just a _kid_ , they’re all still just kids, and Elliot impulsively kisses him again, and when he starts speaking again it’s low and urgent and close to Jonah’s ear, intimate and furtive and true.

“You did this thing where you pulled the petals off the flower, in your monologue,” he murmurs, “and you let the petals fall to the ground, and you said, ‘she loves me not,’ and then you just... waited. And you made the audience wait with you. And if anyone else had done it, it would have been cloying or overdone or, I don’t know, awkward, but with you — I watched you every night, I got lost with you, lost in your thoughts with you, all your sadness and resignation and uncertainty, and then you made everything else you said after that grow out of all that sadness, like it was a defensive response to everything you’d been thinking before that we hadn’t heard you say.

“And that scene... I know that you were channeling your own feelings about your own mother, her own disconnect from you, I knew that then and it devastated me, watching you. But it also...  it made me _love_ Chekhov, his words, his fluidity, his softness. _You_ made me love Chekhov. Just you. You’re so good, Jonah, you’re one of the best actors I’ve ever seen on a stage. Everything you do, every choice you make, even when it’s the wrong choice, it’s a brave choice, it’s a _you_ choice, and that, it — it’s terrifying, to watch someone put that much of themselves onstage, into the world, into their own life, and then keep doing it, even when assholes like me come along and mock them, tear them down for it. You’re terrifying. And beautiful. And not like anyone else I’ve ever known. And I... ” he swallows suddenly out of breath and out of words, unable to speak around the lump forming in his throat.

“Elliot,” Jonah says softly. “That whole time, when I let those petals fall, when I was onstage letting everyone settle into that knowledge with me, the knowledge that the person I loved had all these complicated feelings for me, that got in the way of seeing me as I truly was... I was thinking of my own mother, yes, how could I not be? But some nights... some nights, I was thinking of you, and us, and all the things we weren’t telling each other. All of the things I said in that speech about the theatre, about how we need new forms if we’re to survive and advance — I was channeling your voice, your... you. So much of you was in that performance.”

“Oh,” Elliot says, a breathy sigh. “I didn’t know.”

“I’ve been terrible at telling you,” Jonah says.

“No, you haven't,” Elliot says, cupping his face. “You've told me over and over again, I just wasn't paying attention.”

"I was being covert," Jonah says. "I'd prefer never to put myself in the position of being rejected, so I tend to wait for people to come to me." He kisses Elliot's forehead. "I shouldn't have waited," he whispers. 

“No, you had to. You told me, you thought you had to get the timing just right." Elliot runs his fingers over Jonah's temple, down to trace his lips. "I'm sorry. I'm going to spend so much time telling you. And showing you. Everything."

Jonah takes in a breath, contemplates him for a moment, and then exhales. "Well," he says. "I guess you can start by opening your present and telling me what you think."

“Right now?” Elliot sits up.

“At midnight?” Jonah’s lips quirk. “If you like. But the children are nestled all snug in their beds.”

“Shhh,” Elliot says. “Let’s see if Santa came.”  He tugs Jonah out of bed and down the hall, tiptoeing extravagantly downstairs like he’s a kid again.

No matter how old he gets, he’ll always find something magical, something mystical, even, about a lit Christmas tree surrounded by presents. The lights in the great room are off, and there’s no light except for the warm glow cast by the white lights of the tree, and the pale shimmer of moonlight mirrored on the snow outside. There’s a hush over everything, and for a moment the two of them pause, just to take it in. Jonah curls his hand silently around Elliot’s waist, and Elliot leans back, enjoys the moment, until at last sheer curiosity propels him forward to the tiny package lying on top of the pile of presents.

It’s small, wrapped in nondescript red wrap with a silver ribbon. Elliot dutifully rattles it once again, only to hear empty air. He looks at Jonah cautiously and opens one end to pull out a box. Inside the box is an envelope.

Jonah shifts, looking the tiniest bit apprehensive, which is silly, Elliot’s already made up his mind to love the fuck out of whatever is inside. He slides a fingernail along the envelope crevice and turns the contents upside down.

Two tickets spill out into his palm. He holds them up to the Christmas tree lights to read them, then lets out a gasp.

“Jonah,” he says. “This is... amazing.”

Jonah shrugs. “I thought we might make an evening of it. Or a weekend, if you prefer to spend your weekends in the city. I know you think New York is overrated, but I think even you might put up with it given a decent hotel and a Roundabout show.”

Elliot stares at him. “You were going to ask me,” he says, understanding dawning. 

“It’s not until April. I thought I’d give you plenty of time to get used to it,” Jonah says wryly. “Or to change your mind, as the case may be.”

Elliot moves into his arms, clutching the tickets. “You — you weren’t even sure if I’d say yes. _Jonah_.”

“What can I say?” Jonah says, stroking Elliot’s cheek. Then he adds, barely above a whisper: “Just don't tell me perhaps.”

“It’s yes,” Elliot breathes. “Yes. Yes.”

They’re kissing there, in the moonlight, with the snow falling outside and their arms tight around each other, when they’re interrupted by a voice behind them. “Oh, hey, guys.”

They turn to find Blake standing there, unconcerned, holding something white and feathery-looking in his hands.

“I just finished this and was going to pop it on top of the tree,” he says. He holds out his hands and reveals what looks like a giant starfish-octopus hybrid, its star-tentacles unfurled an unnatural length into the air.  At the end of each tentacle is a round portrait. There’s a portrait with two stick figures whose resemblance to Nicholas and Caroline is uncanny; one with a portrait of stick-Jane, one for stick-Blake, and — Elliot laughs. His stick figure is leaning against a stick Jonah with his arms crossed, a reluctant smile tugging at his face. Jonah has stars for eyes.

“What’s that in the top portrait?” Jonah asks, pointing to the fifth unassigned tentacle.

Blake peers at it, as if he needs to examine it to know what he drew. After a moment he straightens and says proudly, “That’s Dril.”

“The... Twitter account?” Elliot blinks.

“The modern internet philosopher, yes,” Blake says. “I know he’s not here among us, but of course he’s always with us in spirit, so who better to join us on the tree? Since he’s anonymous and essentially a disembodied misanthropic voice on social media, I’ve chosen to represent him as a cloud being yelled at by an angry man.”

“Where’s the angry man?” Jonah asks with every indication of sincerity.

“Oh, he’s not there,” Blake explains cheerfully. “But you can see the impact of his angry words on the shape of the cloud. I was channeling a little Bob Ross, a little Masaru Emoto. I think it works.”

At any other time, Elliot thinks, there might have been a moment in which he and Jonah carefully didn’t look at each other. But tonight, flush with Christmas spirit and the specific kind of good will that comes from being ravished by a very hot individual who’s just presented him with very hot tickets, all he can think of is that it’s obvious why Jonah sees Blake as a kindred spirit. They’re both so much themselves — fully, unashamedly, gloriously themselves.

Elliot beams at him. “Yeah, it works,” he says. “It’s a great tree-topper.” And then he surprises himself and gives Blake a hug. Blake holds the starfish away from the crush of Elliot’s body.

“I’m being hugged,” Blake informs Jonah. “Could you hold my starfish?” Jonah dutifully takes it. “Thanks.” Blake wraps one arm around Elliot and hugs him back.

“I’m glad you’re here,” Elliot tells him. “I’m glad I got to spend Christmas with you and your crazy games and your mom’s Mannheim Steamroller cds.”

“Well, a Christmas without Mannheim Steamroller,” Blake begins, and then his face lights up. “Hey! That’s it!”  Jonah is just placing the Dril-Fish on top of the tree.

The starfish, with its long tentacle arms, wobbles but stays in place as Jonah steps away. It looks completely out of place atop the postcard-ready perfection of their perfectly trimmed Airbnb tree.

“That’s perfect,” Elliot says, because it is.

Jonah turns and gives him a smile. “I’m glad we agree,” he says, and he reaches out for Elliot’s hand.

“You know,” Blake says thoughtfully, and Elliot assumes he’s about to comment on the work of art he’s just committed.

Instead, he continues: “I've been doing some research into the Babysitters' Club, and I think it's fair to say that Claudia and Kristy would never have lasted as a couple. Their personal managerial styles were too different. But I think you two will be just fine.”

Jonah says, “I think we’ve just been gifted with a prophecy.”

“I think we’ve just been told we’re a Christmas miracle,” Elliot laughs.

“Don’t you think we aren’t,” Jonah says, drawing him into his arms for another kiss.

When they finally break apart again, Blake is smiling benevolently at them. “Yeah,” he says, apparently addressing the Dril fish. “I think they’ll be just fine.”

**Author's Note:**

> The song that they're bantering over the whole time is ["Quizas, Quizas, Quizas](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3g8Y-WxbAA) ("Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps)," the Doris Day English version of which was used in _Strictly Ballroom_ in [this glorious scene](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uRYgVTECdQ) which Jonah and Elliot have 100% recreated at some point. 
> 
> In addition to being a killer opening line for a song, "You won't admit you love me" is the most Elliot thing in the world. <3


End file.
